Becoming Intense

"We’re gonna have to build some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that’s the basic main staple of your diet, you’re gonna die. In a meaningful way, you’re going to die."

"As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up."

- David Foster Wallace

Sometimes it is difficult to explain becoming intense to people, because for most people they haven't recognized the countless epistemic breaks and threshold-points that they have come across. Usually the rationalize somewhere inside those events some aspect of control, whereas the world is far vaster and far more dazzling than any of us can expect, I curiously expect. And as we reach these moments of intensity, whether with the epistemic break of the Higgs- Boson particle (curiously named, named for fame and recognition without sufficient regard to the depth either of that discovery or the universe (which is the working-title for something unknown)). Despite the quite possibly callused minds of physicists, and the worn down business people who have no possible way forward amidst banking crises and confusion, there is the obvious conclusion, always the obvious conclusion; this is merely threshold of understanding, and it happens oftener than we would like to think. 

Curiously, these two moments of intensity are instances of certain forms of egotism and a distinct lack of humility; discovery is not invention. The world, the universe, the patterns of our existence were formed at a vastly different time, and unfold despite our expectations. The gathering intensity outside of our rather rudimentary household we call civilization is of the kind that has always been there, and which tends towards a folding in upon itself at the same time as it maintains equilibrium which always shatters and reforms with new complexities, new iterations, new depths. And it is by reading simultaneously Felix Guattari and Gilles DeLeuze' A Thousand Plateaus and David Foster Wallace' cryptic Infinite Jest which marks a certain point of clarification; once these texts are completed I will revel in my ability to simplify complexity before the reader's very eyes, and demonstrate using this means that though the smallest particle may appear to be an isolated mass, there is by all means further unexplored depths; that complexity can be reduced into simple explanation but that is only a means of demonstrating that life imbues every single measurement of this fabric we call existence.